Black Manhattan: Theater and Dance Music of James Reese Europe, Will Marion Cook, and Members of the Legendary Clef Club by The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra (review)

Recent jazz history pedagogy, as well as other disciplines like film music, have witnessed an effort to reinterpret accepted historical narratives in an attempt to present a more accurate account of jazz’s history “as it has never been told before.”¹ For instance, Alyn Shipton devotes a considerable amount of space to ragtime’s trip to the city where it served as the focus of popular “syncopated orchestras,” in which New York City played an important role in the developing African American musical theater scene.² So, important figures like Will Marion Cook garnered increased yet well deserved attention (besides jazz aficionados and those familiar with the landmark work of Tom Riis and Mark Tucker) beyond the conventional textbook reference to Cook’s leadership of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra and its widely acclaimed 1919 European tour, featuring a young Sidney Bechet.³ Now, alongside more recognizable contributors to this scene like Cook and James Reese Europe, less familiar names like Ford Dabney and William H. Tyers have begun to enter into more widespread conversation about this important time in the early development of jazz. In perhaps the most useful companion to Tom Riis’s work—and one that predates the Shipton and DeVeaux/Giddins textbooks—Black Manhattan: Theater and Dance Music of James Reese Europe, Will Marion Cook, and Members of the Legendary Clef Club offers the most representative sampling of composers and songwriters active in the New York African American entertainment scene during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Moreover, the recording remains particularly useful to jazz educators because it presents in clear audio fidelity the artists and music that helped establish the foundation for big bands in the 1920s and 1930s.

Black Manhattan is another fine addition to the New World Records collection and features Rick Benjamin and his Paragon Ragtime Orchestra. The orchestra has made a name for itself through historical reconstructions like the one featured on Black Manhattan since the mid-1980s, perhaps most notably in a 2003 version of Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha in which Benjamin employed the sort of smaller theater orchestra known to Joplin in the 1910s.⁴

Each of the pieces on Black Manhattan comes from a member of the Clef Club, officially founded in 1910. As upwardly mobile African Americans sought better opportunities in the first generations after the Civil War, a new middle-class population began to inhabit Manhattan’s West Side in a place that became known as “Black Bohemia.”⁵ Thus, African Americans in the entertainment industry enjoyed a new and enthusiastic public desiring African American music, dancing, and comedy at various clubs throughout Black Bohemia. At the essence of this community remained an increased awareness of the worth and dignity of African Americans as important members of modern society. This increased social consciousness foreshadowed the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and informed the transition to bop in the 1940s. In a time before local musicians’ unions admitted African Americans, Europe and his associates founded the Clef Club (which met across the street from the Marshall Hotel) to ensure fair wages and to secure playing opportunities in white and black Manhattan. Soon, the all-male Clef Club garnered a reputation for being dependable, courteous, and highly skilled musicians who were also in demand at...